Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philosopher, cultural critic and philologist whose work has exerted a profound influence on modern intellectual history. His writings touched a wide range of topics, including art, philology, history, music, religion, tragedy, culture, and science. Though as a philosopher, Nietzsche has influenced many artists and received many admirers around the world. Chinese artist Mr DING Rong creates oil-painting works which integrate Eastern aesthetic values with Nietzsche’s philosophies, showing viewers a pristine experience of beauty both visually and psychologically.
DING Rong, an innovative explorer of Neo-Imagism painting, was born in 1970 in Shanghai and graduated from the Communication University of China. He is a member of Shenzhen Artists Association and Shanghai Artists Association. He has held solo painting exhibitions in major art museums and organizations in China including Guan Shanyue Art Museum (“We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once – DING Rong’s Paintings on Chinese Rice Paper”, October 2021, Guan Shanyue Art Museum, Shenzhen, China), Jiangxi Provincial Art Museum (“Azaleas in Full Bloom – DING Rong’s Paintings on Chinese Rice Paper”, August-September 2021, Jiangxi Provincial Art Museum, Nanchang, China), Qingpu Museum (“Growing Colours – DING Rong’s Paintings on Chinese Rice Paper”, January-February, 2021, Qingpu Museum, Shanghai, China), Shanghai International Commodity Auction Art Center (“Treasured and Delicate – DING Rong’s Paintings on Chinese Rice Paper”, October 2019, Shanghai International Commodity Auction Art Center, Shanghai, China), and Shanghai Research Institute of Culture and History (“Herbaceous Moments – DING Rong’s Paintings on Paper”, September 2019, Shanghai Research Institute of Culture and History, Shanghai, China), to name but a few. His works were collected by museums, organizations and private collectors in China, Japan, Australia and USA.
With Love and Nectar – I oil on canvas 30×30cm 2022 DING Rong
We have art in order not to die of the truth.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power
With Love and Nectar – II oil on canvas 30×30cm 2022 DING Rong
If we train our conscience, it kisses us while it hurts.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
2022 – VII oil on canvas 30×30cm 2022 DING Rong
You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
With Love and Nectar – III oil on canvas 30×30cm 2022 DING Rong
For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
With Love and Nectar – IV oil on canvas 30×30cm 2022 DING Rong
All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
With Love and Nectar – V oil on canvas 30×30cm 2022 DING Rong
That which is done out of love is always beyond good and evil.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
With Love and Nectar – VI oil on canvas 30×30cm 2022 DING Rong
Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
2022 – VIII oil on canvas 30×30cm 2022 DING Rong
What then is truth?
A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense
With Love and Nectar – VII oil on canvas 30×30cm 2022 DING Rong
My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it – all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary – but love it.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals / Ecce Homo
With Love and Nectar – VIII oil on canvas 30×30cm 2022 DING Rong
True, we love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving. There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
With Love and Nectar – IX oil on canvas 30×30cm 2022 DING Rong
One must give value to their existence by behaving as if ones very existence were a work of art.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
With Love and Nectar – X oil on canvas 30×30cm 2022 DING Rong
Everything straight lies. All truth is crooked, time itself is a circle.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
With Love and Nectar – XI oil on canvas 30×30cm 2022 DING Rong
The end of a melody is not its goal: but nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either.
— Friedrich Nietzche,Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits
With Love and Nectar – XII oil on canvas 30×30cm 2022 DING Rong
Beauty is for the artist something outside all orders of rank, because in beauty opposites are tamed; the highest sign of power, namely power over opposites; moreover, without tension that violence is no longer needed: that everything follows, obeys, so easily and so pleasantly – that is what delights the artist’s WILL TO POWER.– Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power
